If you ever had your dreams crushed into a fine powder only to watch it get sniffed up by a giant snake or some beast, you might want to seek help. But you also might want to take a look at this kid and use him as some inspiration. Three-year-old Mikhail Osipov is considered a chess prodigy, so he ended up on Russian television to show off his talents and see if he could be voted one of Russia’s most talented kids. Something along those lines.
The problem is that Osipov has to defeat chess grandmaster and world champion Anatoly Karpov, a guy who takes chess seriously and doesn’t seem interested in taking it easy on the kid. That or he’s just Russian and it really seems like he wants to crush this child’s spirits, much like Ivan Drago. I’ve seen Rocky IV too many times, but that is the outcome we achieve out of this game. According to the fine folks on Reddit, Osipov was given ten minutes for each move to two minutes for each of Karpov’s moves, taking the grand master to a possible draw. The kid refuses it and then ends up losing on time, leading to the slice of emotion we see in the clip above.
Reddit user obvnotlupus sums it up with one comment:
It is a thing of beauty, but the good news is that there’s a happy ending. After some consolation from his mother, the show continues and the young boy goes on to solve some chess puzzles for the audience and hang with the grandmaster. It’s a lot sweeter than that other chess master who showed up the hustler in NYC, but it might be less satisfying. That all depends on how you see kids, I suppose.
(Via Reddit / Pedestrian)
